James Strecker Reviews the Arts

I didn’t intend to read as many patriarchy-challenging/condemning books at one go over the last while, but most of the following nine, each one highly recommended, turned out to be, at least partially, thus inclined. These books often either celebrate admirable aspects of gutsy women or document the horrible conditions of women in often brutal patriarchal cultures, sometimes both.

1)A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX by Kate Lister

This endlessly informative, perkily and energetically written, sometimes humorous and always challenging book ends with the following: “We must talk about consent, pleasure, masturbation, pornography, love, relationships and our own bodies. Because the only way we will dispel shame is to drag sex out in the open and have a good long look at it. History has shown us how damaging shaming sexual practices. in their myriad forms, can be. Let’s learn the lesson.”

Chapter titles include A History of the Cunt, A History of Virginity Tests, Medieval Impotence Tests, Sex and Cycling, Sex Work in the Ancient World, Filthy Fannies, Hair Today Gone Tomorrow and too often one learns how medical/cultural authority has been male stupidity at its egotistical and terrified worst. Images include an “Indian gouache painting of a giant penis copulating with a female devil c. 1900” and a photo titled: “Anonymous same-sex Victorian lovers enjoy a spot of cross-dressing and mutual masturbation.” Also included is a photo with the caption: “Tart cards in a British phone box in 2004.”

2) CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS by Viv Albertine

In the seventies, male-dominated, and virtuoso-worshipping rock scene in Britain, what better course for a female revolution than through a band called The Slits with a drummer called Paloma aka Palmolive, a guitarist and a bass player who knew almost nothing at first about their instruments, and a totally uninhibited lead singer aged fourteen about whom we read: “..halfway through the set she was dying for a piss, she didn’t want to leave the stage and couldn’t bear to be uncomfortable, so she just pulled down her leggings and knickers and pissed on the stage – all over the next band’s guitarist’s pedals as it happened – I was so impressed. No girl had pissed on the stage before, but Ari didn’t do it to be a rebel or to shock, it was much more subversive than that: she just needed a piss. In these times when girls are so uptight and secretive about their bodies and desperately trying to be ‘feminine’, she is a revolutionary.”

This hard-to-put-down, unflinchingly yet casually honest, uninhibited, and instinctively perceptive autobiographical account by guitarist Viv Albertine, friend of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten and tour-mate of The Clash, inspires affection and admiration as it takes us into the life of a young woman learning the ropes not only of making music but subtly of existence.

3)FIGHTING THEORY: AVITAL RONELL IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE. Translated by Catherine Porter

“According to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, democracy in America began with a violent break, one that has haunted America ever since, because this violence (as we are seeing it today) keeps returning in a ruthless or ungovernable way. … And for Nietzsche as for Mary Shelly, America is a sort of laboratory that contains and spikes monstrosity also.” Elsewhere, Ronell says, “The hatred directed against women that comes out in the Judeo-Christian is hatred directed against the impulse to know.” …. Or try this, “I try to show that idiocy, for Wordsworth, for Rilke, for Wallace Stevens and others, is poetry itself. It is the place of extreme nonknowing, or rather the site of an absence of relation to knowledge, a place of pure reflection that nevertheless has nothing to do with philosophy or cognition.”

Ronell’s scope could be daunting as could her high-speed chase and nabbing of relevancies, but it is indeed an inspiring ride that stimulates, teases, informs, and dances with the reader’s mind. Learning doesn’t need to plod if it can fly, and Ronell’s mind certainly soars, all with a sense of humour and deep human feeling. As a result, it’s time to reread some Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida and and and…..and read some more Ronell. Ronell comes across as instinctively hip in pulling in her densely-populated realm of ideas, and exciting as she does so. Is this book, as it challenges on every line, intimidating? Or does Ronell with her articulation of provocative ideas and connections constantly provide a reader with a freshly-watered path of seeds for the mind.
A very fulfilling experience.

4) THE FILMS OF FAY WRAY BY Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich

I think I was first curious about actress Fay Wray because she was born on an Alberta farm and, of course, was later famously paired with King Kong in both jungle and atop the Empire State Building. It’s strange how one becomes gradually fascinated by a porcelain-skinned screen actress, one whose eyes seem often rooted in a trance as she speaks with precise early talkies diction, and I progressed in no particular order through the following:

The Wedding March of 1928 with Erich von Stroheim; The Finger Points of 1931 – and the somewhat stilted early sound-era acting shows – based upon the murder of an idealistic reporter who took on gangsters and was killed for it; The Most Dangerous Game of 1932 with Joel McRea and Fay Wray stranded on a remote island where a madman Russian count enjoys hunting human prey – it is here we first have a leggy Wray in tattered dress and wide-eyed stare of horror; the classic King Kong of 1932 with its “notorious censored scene” of ape undressing woman and Miss Wray on all cylinders with wide-wide-eyed stares and screams at many a turn (terrific photos of all included); 1934’s Once to Every Woman with Wray as “dedicated nurse Mary Fanshawe in love with, and soon disillusioned by, that cheating Dr. Preston; the 1934 crime melodrama Woman in the Dark, with its Dashiell Hammett roots; and two personal favorites – a charming comedy, The Richest Girl in the World, with costars Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea, and a suspenseful The Clairvoyant in which Wray “certainly holds her own opposite Claude Rains, one of the screen’s greatest actors.” Rains is another one I’ve been checking out.

5)COMPLICATED WOMEN: SEX AND POWER IN PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD by Mike LaSalle

It was indeed a “true Golden Age of women’s films” from 1929 to 1934, and we are told why: “Between 1929 and 1934, women in American film were modern! They took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women acted after 1968….Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties ‘good or bad – sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along and blasted away these stereotypes. Garbo turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale. Meanwhile, Norma Shearer succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she’d never been: the bedroom. Garbo and Shearer took the stereotypes and made them complicated.”

Of course, these two ladies were not alone – their companions soon included, to name only several, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis, Jean Harlow, Miriam Hopkins, Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West – but then the “Production Code became law in Hollywood,” vigorously propelled by Joseph Breen, an avid Catholic, political reactionary, and anti-Semite who wrote, “These damn Jews are a dirty filthy lot.” In other words, Breen pulled real life and creativity, with much help, up the ass of right-wing America and the Catholic church. As a result, films in Hollywood were bound and gagged for three decades to follow. This too is a very important book.

6)FANTASYLAND: HOW AMERICA WENT HAYWIRE, A 500-YEAR STUDY by Kurt Andersen

Okay, let’s do Trump first. Author Kurt Anderson, co-founder in 1986 and, for seven years editor, of Spy magazine recalls the following concerning Donald Trump: “we devoted dozens of pages exposing and satirizing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew then. It was kind of providential that he came along just as we were creating a magazine to chronicle America’s rich and powerful jerks…..Trump’s reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed…Among the many shocking things about Trump is his irreligiosity – that our Christian party chose the candidate who was the least Christian of the lot, and that white evangelicals nonetheless approve of President Trump overwhelmingly.”

In this context in which a major country’s leader is a liar, cowardly bully, and a ridiculous and egomaniacal ass, he has, according to perverted logic, a great number of followers. They too live a reality-denying and fantasy existence “as the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe what you want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.”

This brilliantly conceived and realized book is informative, mind-opening, keenly insightful, and gripping in its detailed and intriguing narrative. It is also disturbing as hell, and after each dip into the text I need a break from this unrelenting account of a fucked-up country whose founding dreams were made of Puritanical severity, whose exploratory impetus was out and out greed, whose nobility of heart was too often racist and sexist suppression, and whose rugged individualism was self-centred and immature inability to face life as it is without hypocrisy. I’ve personally known, admired, loved even, a number of Americans who were and are special human beings. They despair of Trump, and his America, as much as the rest of us – and despair of his followers.

7)MIRIAM HOPKINS: LIFE AND FILMS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL by Allan R. Ellenberger

What is it about the great actresses who emerged in the thirties? A subtle feminine grandeur? A confidence of being that imbued every performance with solid but unforced presence? A blend of individual human personality and complex technical smarts that shaped every character with distinct qualities? A long-lasting impact because we can’t imagine their performances done any other way? A knack for greatness in the art of acting? The mystery of everyday womanhood?

Here are the films of Miriam Hopkins I have watched from one to ten times already and will again watch again any time anywhere. Take the dinner scene of Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise directed with a polished sense of sexual fun and European sophistication for adults by Ernest Lubitsch – she pickpockets his watch, he her garter, and both delight in the game, and so do we. Or watch the two films in which Hopkins and her archrival Bette Davis star together – Old Acquaintance and The Old Maid – and compare how two theatrical presences emerge and hold their ground, each in competition with the other. In the former film, Davis gets to shake Hopkins quite violently and no doubt quite happily so– it’s in the script. Yet in Men Are Not Gods, Hopkins is quite touching in her compassion for an actress who is pregnant and the actor, her husband, with whom Hopkins is in love.

Or what about the two men and Hopkins of Design for Living and her believably casual final resolution – why not have both? Hopkins is quite at home in The Heiress among de Haviland, Clift and Richardson and gut-wrenching during and after the rape in The Story of Temple Drake. Do you know a sexier moment in film than when Hopkins as the “sluttish” Champaigne Ivy sits naked and sheet-covered on a bed and dangling her naked leg to tempt Dr Jekyll to “come back soon?”

Perhaps Hopkins was “one of the most difficult stars in Hollywood” but she was also gifted and admirably gutsy in taking charge of her film and stage careers. She had intellectuals Dreiser, Parker, and Stein as friends and had “a close and enduring friendship with Tennessee Williams.” In The Richest Girl in the World, the scene where Hopkins realizes she is coming to love Joel McCrea is a lesson in reaction acting with Hopkins doing a whole palette of expressions – I’ve watched this scene several dozen times. And I recommend this book about an underrated and overlooked major actress.

8) EARLY RECORDINGS AND MUSICAL STYLE; changing tastes in instrumental performance 1900-1950 by Robert Philip

Author Robert Philip spells out his purpose at the outset: “Recordings show how performance has gradually changed from the early twentieth century to our own time”. and we can witness how “performing styles can be seen as remnants of nineteenth century style.” “They demonstrate how the practices of the late twentieth century, including those we take entirely for granted, have evolved. The greatest value of this is that it forces us to question unspoken assumptions about modern taste, and about the ways in which we use it to justify our interpretations of earlier performance practice.”

The recordings of the early twentieth century are the link between two eras and they provide a “valuable key to understanding both the development of modern performance practice, and the practices of earlier centuries,” Philip also points out. One of the themes running through this book is that “musicians do not necessarily do what they say”… “and that in many cases it would be impossible to deduce everyday features of performance without the recordings” Philip takes us through quite detailed comparisons and discussions in chapters titled, for example, Flexibility of Tempo, String Vibrato, Orchestral Portamento, Tempo Rubato, and Long and Short Notes.

Be warned that you’ll inevitably compile a list of performances you have to hear, really hear. I am so tempted by this passage: “On recordings, the contrast between the old and the new school is very vivid. Sometimes the two styles can be heard side by side, for example in the famous recording of J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins made in 1915 by Kreisler and Zimbalist. This shows very clearly the difference between Kreisler’s continuous vibrato, which was unusual at that date, and Zimbalist’s traditional, more sparing use of it…”

9)BEETHOVEN’S CONVERSATION BOOKS VOLUME 1 NOS. 1 TO 8 (FEBRUARY TO MARCH 1820 Edited and Translated by Theodore Albrecht

Beethoven lovers rejoice! A few months ago, this announcement grabbed my attention: “A complete new edition of Beethoven’s conversation books, now translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Covering a period associated with the revolutionary style of what we call “late Beethoven”, these often lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible in English for the scholar and Beethoven-lover.”

Beethoven had increasing deafness from around 1798 and by 1818, he’d begun “carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances to jot their sides of conversations, while he answered aloud. Often, he himself used the pocket-sized booklets to make shopping lists and other reminders, including occasional early sketches for his compositions. Today, 139 of these booklets survive, covering the years 1818 up to the composer’s death in 1827 and including such topics as music, history, politics, art, literature, theatre, religion, and education as perceived on a day-to-day basis in post-Napoleonic Europe.”

I’m now reading “February 1818 to March 1820” which means having a huge number of “new footnotes exclusive to this edition and brand-new introductions” in support of comments written by a variety of individuals who chatted and dined and drank with Beethoven. We don’t learn much of Beethoven’s own thinking, since the books usually contain questions and responses of Beethoven’s company at the time and not Beethoven’s own verbal comments and responses.

The editor has much to deal with, from, say, the self-serving forging of entries of Schindler, Beethoven’s occasional friend/secretary , to even the changing of numbering system on Vienna’s streets, to passing indications – perhaps – of Beethoven’s being commissioned to compose the Missa Solemnis. Let’s face it, these books, chaotic and mysterious as they can be on each page, do suggest fascinating aspects of the day to day life of a great composer. What did Beethoven say to evoke a specific comment, one often wonders, and one is gradually drawn, in countless fragments of conversation, into the world of a great creative spirit and mind.